Posted on 06/02/2007 1:03:33 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
A Michigan cop, who'd obviously been hit over the head with a billy club one time too many, levied criminal charges against a man who used an open, public Wi-Fi network outside the cafe that was running it.
The dastardly computer criminal, Sam Peterson II, of Cedar Springs, Mich., chose to pay a $400 fine, do 40 hours of community service, and stay on probation six months.
Peterson has no criminal record. He's a 39-year-old toolmaker, volunteer firefighter, and secretary of a bagpipe band.
Peterson had gotten in the habit of checking e-mail on his lunch break in front of the Re-Union Street Cafe in Sparta, Mich. "[I]instead of going inside the shop to use the free Wi-Fi offered to paying customers, he chose to remain in his car and piggyback off the network, which he said didn't require a password," according to the article from Fox News. He did it on lunch breaks for more than a week.
Now, here's where the craziness starts.
Someone in a nearby barbershop saw Peterson's car pull up every day and sit in front of the coffee shop without anybody getting out.
A sane person would have knocked on Peterson's window and said, "Dude, I noticed you come here and sit in your car every day? What's up with that?"
But of course we live in paranoid times.
So the dummy in the barbershop called the cops.
Sparta Police Chief Andrew Milanowski asked Peterson where he got the Internet connection, and Petsron said from the cafe.
Now, the story so far is shocking enough, but it gets even more shocking:
Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser, but still felt that a law might have been broken.
"We came back and we looked up the laws and we figured if we found one and thought, 'Well, let's run it by the prosecutor's office and see what they want to do,'" Milanowski said.
Here's how that reads to me: They don't care about who's using Wi-Fi in Sparta, Mich. The police chief just didn't like the way Peterson parted his hair, and so he dug and dug and dug until he found something he could charge Peterson with.
Peterson copped a plea. If he'd fought it, he could have faced a sentence of up to five years in jail, and a $10,000 fine.
Sparta, Mich. residents, when you pay your tax bills, I want you to think about how this kind of nonsense is how your government is spending your money.
Laws like the Michigan law are pretty common, and they're just plain bad law.
A reasonable person encountering an open Wi-Fi connection will assume it's open until finding evidence otherwise. But most hacking laws assume the opposite -- you need to be told that you can use the Wi-Fi connection or else the law assumes you're a criminal.
In the real world, landowners are required to post their land as private property before accusing someone else of trespassing. The law correctly recognizes that you can't accuse people of crossing boundaries unless they're told where the boundaries. Laws governing Wi-Fi should be written similarly. If you want to keep trespassers off your network, you should password-protect it.
No, genius.
Street lights are installed for precisely that purpose.
Try again.
Uhh. I don't thinks so.
Put down the crack pipe and the ipod and try again...
So I checked out FR for the latest news, and looked at my email to see if anyone wrote to me. This is a crime?
You committed two crimes. The worst of the two was being a conservative checking out FreeRepublic. In today’s way of thinking, liberals, would have have you taken to an insane asylum for being a conservative.
Where was the crime? He should have fought this.
These unprotected private servers have likely violated the terms of their ISP agreement, at least as far as the legal position that their ISP would be likely to take. But the only legal thing you could do would be to refrain from connecting and report the situation to the ISP carriers in the area.
And your attitude was the kind the cops in my area had.
If that is your goal in life I know just the city where you should apply for a "job".
In this case the open connection is a public accommodation. Should someone be charged for walking inside and using their public restroom?
Not sure where these local guys come off doing anything about it.
Nope. Few people get in their car, drive to another parking lot (the same one every time) and sit there through their lunch hour.
Never going in, never getting out of their car, just sitting there.
I wouldn't consider that baiting. If I'm sitting in my car not breaking any laws or doing anything wrong, it isn't a cop's business why I'm there, and I would tell him so. In a much more diplomatic way of course. ;)
UPS, Fed-Ex, USPS, etc. drivers do exactly this (except in certain crime filled neighborhoods).
Meanwhile during this brave cops b.s. I wonder if any real crime was going on in the town of Sparta Michigan?
Robbery, rape, theft. mugging?
Sorry but there are free open to the public wifi connections and if you present your as one ( no encription or password needed)then expect it to be used as one...
“Nope. Few people get in their car, drive to another parking lot (the same one every time) and sit there through their lunch hour.
Never going in, never getting out of their car, just sitting there.”
There are lots of things that people do that “few people” do. A police officer with an ounce of judgement would have let this slide with an admonishment to stop making people suspicious in the neighborhood. Of course if this “criminal” had any balls at all he would have fought this.....and the “victim”....oh, that’s right....there IS no victim.
Considering the quality of the bureaucracy -- from the cop to the chief to the DA -- I would have copped a plea, as well.
“Considering the quality of the bureaucracy — from the cop to the chief to the DA — I would have copped a plea, as well.”
Yeah, you’re right. I was a little tough on the guy....they, and the stupidity they display so openly would have ruined him financially for certain.
Even for a plea this was pretty harsh. This sounds not much less than what Sandy Burglar got for stealing secrets.
in order to arrest him they must have spoken to someone in the coffee shop. how did they know he didnt have “permission” to use the wi-fi? he could have gotten a coffee to go and was sitting in his car.
where?
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